Mobile Porn Machine: As The Internet Turns 25 Years Old, Should We Censor Sex?

The internet ideally was supposed to be about transforming scientific advancement. Then the world watched as this revolutionary invention transformed into a sex machine… is the 25th anniversary of the invention of the internet the time to do something about the sex industry?

In a related report by The Inquisitr, mobile data usage in the US happened to increase right as mobile porn doubled in popularity:

“When it comes to porn usage statistics, mobile porn accounts for 62 percent in the United States, with 52 percent on smartphones and 10 percent on tablets…. The reason mobile porn becomes an issue is because 36 percent of all internet traffic is pornography, and the biggest porn site gets over four billion page views and 350 million unique visits per month. The world’s largest internet porn site, XVideo, transfers 29 petabytes a month, or 50 gigabytes per second, of streaming smut.”

Streaming porn is not the reason the internet was invented 25 years ago. Back in March 12, 1989, Tim Berners-Lee wrote a proposal for what would eventually become known as the World Wide Web. His main goal was to facilitate the sharing of information between researchers at CERN. Similarly, advancements in data storage and transmission were necessary in order for the search for the Higgs Boson to commence.

Another hallmark date was when CERN made its web technology available for free in 1993. From there, web browsers like Mosaic were released along with internet directories like Yahoo. Then the first search engine WebCrawler made all that information easier to find.

But from the beginning many viewed this new technology simply as a porn machine. Even before web browsing became possible, people were trading nude photos on Internet newsgroups. And it’s been a downhill trend ever since. An estimated 36 percent of all internet content is related to porn, including a third of all internet bandwidth, and one in four searches are for porn or nude photos.

For example, many people search for photos of Kate Upton nude and the model responded by suing a website that created fakes. According to Google, the phrase “porn machine” itself is rising in popularity across the world, with the United States being in 7th place. The US also placed 9th place for the phrase “mobile porn,” but apparently denizens of Papua New Guinea and Pakistan are about three times more interested in this search compared to Americans.

The scariest statistic of all is that the largest consumers of porn are thought to be in the 12 to 17 age group, with some studies claiming 87 percent of Canadian students having done smartphone or webcam sex. Considering this alarming trend, some have suggested governments should get involved and force independent organizations regulating the internet to act. Others feel that if governments become involved on this issue then there would be a justification for future internet censorship.

The biggest suggestion so far is to partition the internet by forcing porn sites onto the.xxx domain. But since the move from.com to.xxx is optional, most of the “popular”.xxx porn websites do not even rank in the top 100,000 sites, according to Alexa.com. Also, a large percentage of the.xxx domains have nothing to do with porn and instead are non-sex related organizations attempting to protect their name. This is actually a bigger deal than you might think. Years ago a popular porn website used to be whitehouse.com (and it “just happened” to be big while Bill Clinton was in office). Still, this shows just how ineffective this idea has been.

What do you think should be done about how the internet was transformed into a sex machine for viewing mobile porn?